Obituary and discussion: Harold Alton Gould Jr. (18 February 1926–2 July 2021)

Abstract

Harold Alton ‘Hal’ Gould Jr., a distinguished scholar who made many contributions to the anthropological and political study of India, died at his home in Delray Beach, Florida, on 2 July 2021 after a long illness. I first met Harold ‘Hal’ Gould in June, 1965, at the large gathering of anthropologists convened at the University of Chicago to share papers that ultimately would be published as Structure and change in Indian society (New York: Aldine, 1968). As will be displayed in the bibliography below, Hal contributed an essay to that volume on ‘Time-dimension and structural change in an Indian kinship system: a problem of conceptual refinement’. That essay resembled most of the other papers delivered by the gathered cohort of the leading anthropologists working in India. But Hal’s presentation at the time had been somewhat different. He offered a wide-ranging and suggestive interpretation of social stratification in Indian Civilisation that invoked not just anthropology but also history and literature. Perhaps because I was a graduate student in history, I was fascinated by the ambitious range of his exploratory views. From that first encounter, I perceived Hal as perhaps marching to a slightly different drummer than the other distinguished scholars present. Later, as I read more widely in the anthropological literature of India, I realised that Hal was very much ‘at home’ in the conventions of his field, as he published numerous pieces on the religion, society and politics of North India, particularly focusing on the Faizabad region. I came to appreciate his curiosity and engagement when we both participated in a symposium on Urban India organised by Richard Fox at Duke University in 1969. Hal, once described himself as a ‘Rhode Island swamp Yankee’, born in Boston, MA, on 18 February 1926 to Harold A. Gould and Mabel LeBlanc Gould and raised in South Kingston, RI.